Legacy.com, a company that powers the obituary and death listing sections of newspapers around the world, has acquired UK-based rival iAnnounce.

Unlike Legacy.com, iAnnounce isn’t 100% focused on mortality, throwing weddings and other family announcements into the mix too. Its platform is used by local and regional newspaper titles in the UK, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Germany, France and Russia. The iAnnounce platform will continue to be available with the move expanding Legacy.com’s European coverage, a part of the world where it had only a limited footprint until now.

Terms of the acquisition haven’t been announced other than that it was a cash deal. London-based iAnnounce was founded in 2006 by Alex Stitt and Clinton Gormley, with Stitt holding a majority stake in the company. Stitt thought up the idea behind iAnnounce while working for the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. Its investors included Andy Hobsbawm (founder of ‘Internet of things’ platform Evrythng), LoveFilm cofounder William Reeve, Adzuna cofounder Doug Monro and newspaper publishers Johnston Press and Northcliffe Media.

Without knowing how big a cash deal this was, it’s hard to judge its impact on the UK startup scene but Stitt tells me that iAnnounce is “a successful fast-growing international business that has been profitable for 5 years,” which suggest that this was more than a cut-price sell off of a customer database.

A note on the title above: “Dead good” is a British colloquialism meaning ‘really good’. So, if you didn’t know, now you do.

Martin Bryant Editor-in-Chief at The Next Web. You can find him on Twitter, subscribe to him on Facebook, circle him on Google+ and visit his personal site. He's based in Manchester, UK and has a thing for quirky American music and Japanese video games.